Photo in his personal family album:





Photograph dated 1950:




Richard's love of birds carried through his entire life:




Young child posed photo:

Richard attended Essex Catholic High School in East Orange, New Jersey.

Richard, during his senior year, in 1964, was awarded "outstanding athelete of the year". 



He was offered seven academic or athletic scholarships.

During his senior year, he was also Vice-President of the Student Council.



Additionally, he also served as editor of the newspaper and editor of his high school Yearbook.

 

During the Summer after his graduation from high school, Richard won a research scholarship to the Montclair High School Summer Program wherein he designed and constructed a wind tunnel for aerodynamic studies.

Richard had employment with the Josephson & Cuffari Advertising Agency during the end of his Senior year of high school and the Summer before leaving to attend college.

Richard was an assistant to the Art Director, handling paste-ups and mechanicals.

Richard became an instructor and therapist for Scientology, having been introducted to its belief structure by his brother Ronald.

Richard was trained in four out of the eight levels above the state of "clear".  "Clear" represents a state of awareness which allows the individual full and knowing determination over one's life and goals free of abberations on a personal level.  These abberations above the personal level were dealt with on a level of "clear" and which include community, marriage, religion, etc. 

Readings and Performances  

     ° Fitzgerald Show, WOR-AM, New York City

     ° Apogee, Mercer Art Theatre

     ° Channel 13, Cable TV, New Jersey

     ° University of Pennsylvania

     ° Tombrook College, New Jersey
        lecture on mysticism

     ° Apple Tree School (New York State Council)

     ° Dr. Generosity's, New York City

     ° Bronx Council of the Arts

     ° Village Vanguard (2 months in concert)

     ° West Bank Cafe, New York City

     ° Aimee Theatre

     ° Westbeth Poetry Reading Serices (New York State Council)

     ° Calliope Society Readings, New York City included The Scorpio Poems and included 
       participation in the Motet of Four Poems -- UP FROM JERUSALEM

     ° Continum I, New York City

     ° St. John's Church

     ° WNYC 

     ° WPEG-FM Radio

     ° WHPL-AM Radio, Virginia 


Exhibitions (Poetry/Etchings) 

     ° Mexico City and suburbs, traveling group show, Palace of the Fine Art -- 1972
       
     ° Several of his prints are in the Mexico Museum 

     °  Maryland State Museum -- 1971

     °  Gotham Bookmart Gallery, New York City, two man

     °  Oppegard Gallery, one-man show, 1971  (see Dragonette review in 3/71)

     °  Oppegard Gallery, group show -- 1970

     °  Earth People Auction show -- 1971 

     °  Walcott-Fields Gallery, group show -- 1970
 
     °  International Festival in Words & Music -- 1970

     °  International Visual Poetry, London and Paris -- 1969

     °  Brooklyn Museum Art School, graphic exhibit -- 1969

     °  Montclair Community Art Show, New Jersey -- 1969


At Oppegard:

Richard continued to do freelance work.

He gave over 100 poetry readings in cafes, churchs and universities during this time.

He wrote and edited advertising copy (as well as a newsletter) for the Promotion Center, a Madison Avenue advertising firm.

He also wrote and edited "Knowledge Mod Style", for J.C. Jennings Radio Corp, New York City.

Additionally, he was co-editor with award winning poet Hugh Siedman in the publication of an anthology of poetry published in 1971 called Westbeth Poets.  Richard also is credited jointly with Mel Fowler, who was also art editor, on the book design.  
Richard also contributed three piece of art work and two poems -- The Waiting Poem in addition to And Christ's Folly -- both of which will be added to the Legacy Section of this site and to the two linked sites.

Among Richard's credits also was he was one of the founding editors of Metanoia, a small literary journal. 

A flyer in his "bio folder" says Richard will be featured at St. John's-in-the Village "Open Poetry Series" on July 29 and will be heard on August 1 on WNYC-FM.  The readings are from his third volume of poetry.  

He has evolved through being a militant pacifist, a conscientious objector, various brands of religion, yoga, mysticism and witchcraft (not necessarily in that order) to where he is today. "To know where that is, listen to my poetry", he says.

Sample from one of his poems: 

      .... that beautiful blue vision, its red shadows, its 
     lustrous tones and soothing song
     all eminating from a Clear Light
     that makes the Vision of the Eyes    
     of the Veiled Lady so dazzling bright
     that you stop thinking
     and know ....


His poems and mystic drawings have been published in several small periodicals.

Richard was completing his first novel, A Time For Silence. Upon completion, Richard began editing this novel under the direction of Dr. Humphreys, Columbia Graduate School, Special Studies Program. 

Richard had two one-man shows in 1971 (Gotham Bookmark & Oppegard Gallery), over 30 group shows in New York City, around the United States, Mexico in 1970.  Several of his prints are in the Mexico Museum.

He co-founded with a friend the Transformation Foundation, dedicated to the education of society from self-consciousness to world or cosmic consciousness.

His photos appeared in a book published by Bantam edited by John Price called Life Show in addition to Sterio Review.

His first novel, A Time for Silence, won the Creative Writing Award from Doubleday/Columbia University.

Richard received a fellowship for 1971-72 from Columbia University's Graduate Program in Creative Writing.

Richard gave the sponsor of this site a couple copies of the flyer from his one-man show at the Allen Oppegard Gallery, Lexington Avenue, New York City.

He spoke fondly of Ree Dragonette, the author of Parable of the Fixed Stars and Remember Zion, etc., who was a fellow author and poet.  Ms. Dragnonette is the winner of the Emily Dickenson Award in 1971.

She wrote for this flyer:
    The modern artist often has to be part scientist, part mystical optimist, part teacher-poet.  Richard Zarro is such an artist, combining technical, physical evolutionary trends with the visionary fantasies of the ancient prophets, all reconciled in a dynamic that pushes man deep into himself and farther and farther toward that 'otherness' of the great saints and oriental philosophers.

     All of Mr. Zarro's woodcuts, lithographs and etchings are sprung from and interwoven with his poetic sensibility, verbal expression, line and crve are intermingled inseparably in the artist's conscious and unconscious pressures.  Preoccupied with archtypal memory and the recurrent crucifixions of soul and flesh, he combines Christian theology with a timelessly new and old Jungian ssymbolism.  In reverent and erotic exploration, he probes the maternal presence from Maya to Mary, from the Virgin Mother figure to the innocent ripeness of the wild and lusty nymphs.  His mother figures have eloquent tragic eyes, small resonant breasts and sometimes ambiguous sexuality -- their arms become rather more like feathers than early flesh-appendages.

     In choice of pigments, Zarro uses a natural and supernatural spectrum, physiologically conventional, psychically unusual.  Rusts, burnt sienna, a congestive genital red, pure, pure blues suggestive of imagined stellar regions, galactic whites icy and wavering beyond our apprehension.  And black, ultimate primal, spatial black.

My favorites in this exhibit are:
     The Enlightenment, The Opening of the Third Eye is one of eight in a special unpublished edition called, THE LAST METAMRPHOSIS OF MAN INTO GOD.

     This particular one is a four-color etching representative of the artist's religious and poetic philosophy: the divine revelation inherent in the human-bestial form, the muscular strain and outstretch of puny mankind, through faith and vehicular sight, toward ultimate fulfillment.  Metaphysical and apocalyptic  -- he believes we are in the fitful, first rays of total apocalypse at this point in the twentieth century.  Repeatedly, here and in all his other works, one senses the pivotal centality of the notion of the pineal eye, and the strong cumulative force of the solar plexus as the seat of wisdom, as the alchemizer of all natural and psycho-biophysical phenomenon.


     In his verse from THE LAST METAMORPHOSIS OF MAN INTO GOD, he has written,

   "Shedding the body like worn out garmets in lifeforce 
   filing caverns worn in long ago solar night. Solar night
   flowing in on Light, Light of Source, of nuclear transformation,
   of breath-holding life within bones named and preserved by 
   the ones holding  metamorphosis in fear.

   "Every eye of God is turned inward dreaming you alive
   in veins formed by stars and cosmic winds winding, 
   bewilding the First and Second Order under the glass
   while the coming attractions of the Third order are
   burning, open and unhealed before prophesy, hope 
   and ancient omens.

   Hold your head in grief, hold you heart heavy under
   changes, while the wings grow under the wane of the 
   moon."

     Suffering, the sweat-blood-drops of shame and anguish under the hooded, grieving forehead; these states and postures breathe and move throughout his work. 

     My other favorite in this collection is Omega Dream #777.  In this work, man, half phallic, half swooned upon the gentle, oval female principle is reaching up for total exultation, for the dissolving purity of oneness with otherness.  A large, powerful figures climbs a flight of dark, underground stairs.  To  his right is a mountainous pile of corpses, in various stages of decomposition and disaster.  A doorway or arch lets in strange, emcompassing light.  A small figure stands in profile, young, neither male nor female.  Above him is a hung Christ, with piscean cast to his features, and with the web-like feet of certain fishes.  Throughout the composition is the ambience of imminent knowing, and of infinity closing and widening among the planes and convex structures.  The alighment  of the etching is remarkably paradoxical -- a kind of new geometry of perspectives, not warring but distinctly divided except where they are drawn up into the wide light.

     Mr. Zarro says of himself that he is religious and yet reality-struck.  The poet-painter of our time, he believes, must recognize that sensitive man is the messenger between worlds, between the spiritual and the physical domains, which all converge in the dazzling ontology of the apocalypse.  He has told me his work is a fusion of visions both conscious and unconscious, moved without effort of will from his deeps (where all clusters of insight begin) and then executed by discipline and passionate labor.

     Between my two maximum favorites is a tiny etching which shows a phallus bearing an eye, and the eye weeps exquisitely precise tears.  Human phallus or divine -- who can say?  The thrust of Zarro's work is always loaded with metaphysical ambiguitities, but never vague, never pallid or tentative.  Whether he is depicticting the worshipped white goddess of Afro-Indian muse, or the delicate Divine Mother whom he cherishes in all his waking trances, or the sexual male yearing toward transcendance -- every stroke and coiling leaf, every bronze line and grey-white shape means many things.  It is up to the artful audience to complete his verses and his drawings -- we get from any achievement the burden and the explication we bring to it through our own generative attention.

Richard started homesteading in Ulster County.


(insert photo)

Richard was awarded a Certificate of Achievement for having taken the Emergency Medical Technician course in Ulster County for the Woodstock Ambulance Corps, which he helped to establish.

An article appeared in the Woodstock Times (NY) written by Jim Reed of an interview of Richard concerning HAVOC -- A Psycho-Political Terrorist Thriller a mini-series for television based on the novel by Richard of the same name.